First, let me introduce myself. I'm Danilo Passos, A.K.A |N|NjA|, founder of the Brazilian website zelda.com.br. For over the last couple of months, I've been working restless on a little project involving googlemaps and game maps. Please, keep in mind I'm still not advertising the tool around the web, since it's still on a beta phase and we are working on the new main site to lauch with it.

Here is a rundown of the basic features:- Googlemaps view of game maps- Multiple maps per game- Multiple maps per section (floors of a dungeon, caves of an overworld, etc).- Multiple layers of section/maps (enemies per floor, itens per floor, secrets per floor, etc)- Markers per section/maps (googlemaps style)

One of the best feature is the dynamic markers. They are fully interactive! You can:- Click on a particular marker to view more information.- Markers information can have multiple tabs with rich text (one tab can have the info, the other can have a youtube video embebbed, the other screenshots, the other official art... you name it!)- It's possible to hide/shown markers per category or per type! (just click on the right side)- You can add, edit, delete and move your own markers to the map! Share your knowledge with the community!

There are three types of markers so far:- Normal Markers (basic content)- Jump Markers (markers that, when clicked, can redirect you to a position on the map or to a marker).- Label Markers (Big markers usually used to name especial places or the map itself).

This way, I hope I can satisfy everyone when viewing the map:- The mapper, whom can see his original work on the system as it was published- The purists, whom like to see the background, unlabeled- The gamers, whom can see all the secrets, enemies, etc as they seem fit.- The game archivists, whom aside from the info provided by the mapper, can add and share more knowledge to the maps

Please, feel free to navigate through the A Link to the Past! In order to manipulate markers, you need to have a valid login on our forum: zelda.com.br/forum . Since I don't want this to be a hassle to anyone, please use user/password: mapsTest and, after logged in, please do a right click on the map. It will bring a drowdown menu for your actions.

Keep in mind that this is a work in progress and I'm only sharing here first, since the zelda.com.br site is offline while we are working on the new site! This is a 2 year project (but only in the past 3-5 months I started working seriously on that). I would like to thank the mappers that not only allowed me to use their maps, but also provided the RAW files that they used to created their own maps (in no particular order): Peardian, Iron Knuckle, Piranha Plant, Jon Leung, Rick Bruns, TerraEsperZ_ and, of course, my team over zelda.com.br. Sorry if I forgot anyone.

Finally, although these are only Zelda maps, the system is open enough to allow any other map! I intend to make this system available to every mapper, I'm not sure yet how (allow non-zelda maps on my site? create a new site? give the source code and let the community do what they want).

Possible features with no plans for the near future:- Routes- Street view (3D games)- 45 degrees viewing of maps (3D Games, based on images provided by Peardian... need to study the technical difficulties of this).- 3D Models embedded (not sure if we would be able to do it ever... just to have it on the list).

I will provide a quick walkthrough in order to create images that fit on the googlemaps.. It will just depend of my time and feedback

Please, feel free to share any opinions, suggestions, criticisms, etc. I'm really open minded to provide a good tool to mappers and viewers alike I know that there are still some rough edges and polish to do, but right now, the functionalities are the thing i'm really testing.

Finally, although these are only Zelda maps, the system is open enough to allow any other map! I intend to make this system available to every mapper, I'm not sure yet how (allow non-zelda maps on my site? create a new site? give the source code and let the community do what they want).

Once you've made it available for us to make our own stuff, we can probably give you better feedback. Hopefully you'll release it so we can use it on our own sites. If you're going to keep it on your site, I myself, would probably not be interested.

We've talked about this kind of system here before at VGMaps. It would certainly be useful for games with large maps. IMO, it's a bit over-kill for games with smaller areas. For example, I'm not sure I like the way you did Hyrule castle. The floors are logically separated into different "maps", but that actually makes it difficult to follow them if you're trying to use this thing while you play the game. You have to click to go to a different floor, and then you can't see where you just were. Certainly, if every floor is lumped together in one image, it's a bit harder to read, but I would only need to touch my mouse if the whole map didn't fit on the screen. And I get a better picture of where I came from, and where I'm going.

It's also kind of silly to load all the Javascript, marker images, etc, when a floor is small enough to fit on the screen.

Maybe the solution is to use a hybrid of what we do, and what you're doing. Put all the dungeon floors in one big map, but still have your clickable markers to allow the user to the destination of a portal/door.

For larger maps I see a lot of potential. If you ever make this available to us, I would be interested in porting the Wolfenstein 3D maps, the Faery Tale Adventure over-world, and maybe some Phantasy Star II, into this.

And yes, I want to release the system and even help people setup it. The only reason I didn't do so far is that I'm waiting for my main site to be ready and launched before taking another step. I also want to do a clean-up on the code before a release version.

As for the LttP maps, although I agree with you about the complexity of navegating through small maps, one thing I should mention is that the original maps by Iron Knuckle were just like that on the vgmaps. So, aside from minor corrections and changes I've done, the maps are in the same way as they were first published. However, one "easy" solution would be to create a new floor named "ALL" (or something similar) with all the floors together. This way, it would please people that like to keep it as original as possible, as well gamers that like all the info in one place.

As for porting your map, I'd be really happy to see more mappers joining in and using this system I consider myself a map fanatic, and I want this to spread . I will post shortly a tutorial on how to create googlemaps style... then it would be a matter of just sending me the images so you can see how things look like on the system while the code is not released.

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Tutorial for Adobe Photoshop:

Step 1- In your work file, resize the Canvas Size to a base 2 number on both width and height, always rounding up. This will ensure that the script itself won't do an automatic resize (more on that later).

Pixels

Zoom Level

Base

256

0

2^8

512

1

2^9

1024

2

2^10

2048

3

2^11

4096

4

2^12

8192

5

2^13

16384

6

2^14

32768

7

2^15

65536

8

2^16

Example: Say we have an image of 3584x1408. We should just get the hightest dimesion (3584) and look in the table above... The nearest value (rounding up) is 4096. So, we adjust the canvas to 4096x4096 (you should anchor the original image to whatever you want, I normally do it in the center). In this example, we have an map at Zoom 4.

Step 2: Adding more ZoomIf you want your map to be have more zoom levels, you should resize the image now using the same table above.

Example: I want the previous map to have 2 more zooms levels, so I should resize the width and height to 16384 pixels.

Important! When resizing 2D Maps, you should make sure to use the algorithm Nearest Neighbor, instead of Bicubic or similars. If you don't do so, you may lose the Pixel Art on the highest zoom.

This script should ask a few things. At Zoom Level, just type the Zoom you selected on your image. We did the previous steps in order to avoid losing the pixel art (since the script will automatically resize the image if it does not fit our needs). We also do the previous steps to make sure maps following the anchor we want. (I guess I could add a couple of questions to this open source script in the future in order to avoid Step 1&2, maybe in the future).

VGMaps.com is an archive of video game maps up since May 6, 2002. Optimized for at least 800 x 600 resolution.

This site does not contain commercial ROMs or any other illegal materials. All directly "ripped" game images are the property of their respective copyright holders. This web site and compass logo are copyrighted by Jonathan Leung 2002-2018.